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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the emergence of a news ecosystem, focusing on Hespress, Morocco’s first, largest, and most popular news website and its current economic success. My analysis investigates Hespress’s emergence and growth into a significant source for news content, reaching an unprecedented number of readers in Morocco and abroad. This paper argues that the success of Hespress’s business model is grounded in a particularly well-developed understanding of social media, the changing habits of digital readers, and a strategic combination of investigative reporting and curated user-generated content. My findings, then, show how Hespress used a strategy that can serve as a sustainable revenue model which was diversified to include other sources of revenue such as e-commerce, branded events, and native advertising, combined with distribution strategies that rely heavily on social and other digital platforms.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank those interviewees who gave their time to participate in my research. My thanks go to my colleagues, Dr. Jana Fedtke, Dr. Don Shin, Dr. Bouziane Zaid, and Dr. Joseph Gibbs whose comments helped me improve this paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.